Cascaded Cladding Light Extracting Strippers for High Power Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers

We demonstrate efficient cladding light extracting through cascaded strippers for high-power fiber lasers and amplifiers. A selected part of the fiber is divided into five segments, and the fluoroacrylate jackets of three interval segments are gradually removed and replaced with different higher index polymers. It is shown that such cascaded strippers can overcome the challenging problems of localized heating and thermal degradation of the recoating materials, which are limiting factors for the conventional high power cladding light strippers. The power-handling capability of the device is tested up to cladding light of power up to 150 W. A high attenuation of 18 dB has been achieved, whereas the maximum local temperature is less than 64 degrees C. We anticipate that this simple configuration offers a practical solution for cladding light extracting in high power fiber lasers and amplifiers.